Principal’s Message

Dear Students, Parents, Staff and Friends of WIS,

It was lovely to see Year 7 enjoying the school today and really getting to grips with our community in actual bodily presence. Equally joyous to see Year 12 back where they belong. It is amazing how quickly you can become out of touch when you are not around young people all the time and I have enjoyed a return to my youth seeing so many retro t-shirts returning to the fashion shelves. If you have ten minutes, I recommend that you take a look at our whole school assembly and hear the shout outs for some extraordinary achievements of our young people. I wanted to celebrate Victoria Huang in particular. I have already let you know that Garris Choi scored 45 points in the IBDP programme, however, a successful reassessment led to Victoria also being awarded 45 points. Less than 1% of students worldwide achieve this accolade and two WIS students now have that honour. Well done to them both.

In returning to school during this phasing in period, we will evaluate what is working well and what we have room to tweak. I personally reached the point where there are so many moving parts that my desk looks like it is wall papered with post-it notes. We are adapting and it is going well. There is a reminder here of the plan for next week and then moving forward.

I warmly invite you to our parent webinar on Monday where we are looking at screen-time and supporting parents about what they need to know and how to approach their parenting on this issue.

A few parents were asking for a reminder about Horizons Week. In my newsletter on 8 May, we let the community know of a difficult but necessary decision to not plan for this during the first term. We will keep this under review but it remains unlikely that it will return before the end of this academic year. We simply don’t want to expose families to more financial risk with a high risk of cancellation. We also need to maximise learning for the upper years groups where we have needed to delay teaching activities. Should the social distancing rules change sufficiently, we will revisit how we can support an offsite learning experience for Year 7 and Year 8 or do something even better. We will keep you fully informed as the picture becomes clearer in the coming months.

Finally, I have the honour of introducing the new School Council Members who will be working with me to oversee our strategy and school development agenda for the next three years. I salute them for the time and toil they will undertake in their roles for all our good.

Please see attached notices and messages for the week.

Have a restful weekend,

Mr Sammons
Principal

Please click here to view messages and notices from the week